Cljr Clergy an& tjje Cree&s

A SERMON FRE ACHED BEFORE THE
ON TRINITY SUN

WITH AN APPENDIX ON A RECENT WORK
AND THE HUSK," AND AN ARTICLE B

W. H, FREMANTLE, CANON OF CANTERBURY, C
"THEOLOGY UNDER ITS CHANGED CONDITIONS

BY

CHARLES j^ORE, M.A.

PRINCIPAL OF THE PUSEY HOUSE, FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, AND EXAMINING
CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN

RIVINGTONS

WATERLOO PLACE, LONDON

MDCCCLXXXVII

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Cjje Clergy antr tlje Creeps

A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
ON TRINITY SUNDAY, 1887

WITH AN APPENDIX ON A RECENT WORK, ENTITLED THE KERNEL
AND THE HUSK," AND AN ARTICLE BY THE HON. AND REV.
W. H. FREMANTLE, CANON OF CANTERBURY, CALLED
"THEOLOGY UNDER ITS CHANGED CONDITIONS "

BY

CHARLES GORE, M.A.

PRINCIPAL OF THE PUSEY HOUSE, FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, AND EXAMINING
CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN

RIVINGTONS

WATERLOO PLACE, LONDON

MDCCCLXXXVII

The following Sermon was preached on the Hamsden Foundation,
on behalf of " the extension of the Church through the colonies
and dependencies of the British Empire." It makes an appeal to
those who care for Church extension, to look well to it that we
guard the Faith which we are charged to propagate.

"A time to keep silence^ and a time to speak." — Eccl. iii. 7.

I.

The Mission Field is in a certain sense the Con-
fessional of Churches. They confess there their
inward and spiritual diseases without their choice,
or even against their will. The weaknesses
which at home are at least restrained by an
established social order, more or less imbued
with Christian ideas, have free scope for develop-
ing all their dangerous symptoms when " that
which restrain eth "is no more at hand. The
anomalies which custom alone has rendered
tolerable, come out in their true light where
customs have still to be created. The local or
national narrownesses which have impaired the
Catholic character and applicability of the Church's
Message, are only unmasked when its foreign
application becomes the primary object. In this
way the English Church has baen compelled by
her Mission-work to make a great number of
damaging confessions. It is not only or chiefly
that for a long period her ignoring of missionary
obligation revealed her forgetfulness of the first
characteristic of Catholic Christianity. More
than this — since she began to awake to her im-

a 2

4

The Clergy and the Creeds.

perative obligations, she has betrayed herself in
the fulfilment of them.

For example : we may preach the doctrine of
justification by faith at home, and even if we
preach it amiss, at least we preach it where
there is a background of moral law accepted
and recognized, and if the great Pauline prin-
ciple is not put into its true and logical relation
to the older and immutable principles of " right-
eousness and judgment to come," at least it is
in an illogical way held in context by them.
But in India the doctrine was preached to peoples
who mostly lacked the Belief in a Divine Judge,1
and all the error in the preaching had its unre-
strained result. " Our people," a well-educated
Bengali clergyman once said to me, with a naivete
which would have been impossible in an English-
man, c< Our people have been so long taught that
they are justified by faith that they do not believe
in righteousness ." Or, again, we may pride our-
selves on the thoroughly national character of our
Christianity at home ; but it suggests to a man's
mind something quite different from pride when
he finds it abroad exhibiting itself in a marked
unwillingness to welcome Orientals into the circle
of Christian brotherhood, or (among those who
quite avoid this worst fault) in the endeavour to

1 See a very interesting article written from a non-Christian
point of view by a careful observer of religious tendencies in
India, entitled "Progress in India," by Vamadeva Shastin
(Fortnightly Revieiv, Dec, 1885, pp. 798—800).

The Clergy and the Creeds.

5

acclimatize Anglican chants, Gothic architecture,
and Teutonic Puritanism amongst races with a
music and an architecture and a rich symbolism
of their own, only waiting the fertilization which
the Spirit of Christ could infuse into it.2

A great number of illustrations would suggest
themselves to the mind of any one at all acquainted
with the Mission Field. This unmasking of the
weak points of our Church life is at least one of the
debts of gratitude — one among very many — which
we owe to the self-sacrifice of missionaries.

But it is useless confessing what we do not
seek to amend, and it seems to me that we at
home are open to the charge of taking very little
to heart the lessons about our internal condition
which missionary work ought to have taught
English Churchmen. It is of course more agree-
able to disencumber ourselves of such unplea-
sant reflections, by the consideration that other
Churches reveal other faults not less disastrous —
that for example the Eoman Catholic Church has
had its capacity for accommodation put in an un-
pleasant light by the history of Jesuit Missions in
India. For such a sadly common method of escape
from the duty of repentance St. Paul would
have had a severe rebuke. Would he not have
reminded us, like the Corinthians, that the

2 Some of the best missionaries in India, whether of the two
great Societies, of the Oxford and Cambridge Missions at Cal-
cutta and Delhi, or of the Society of St. John the Evangelist,
are now (it must be said) thoroughly alive to the necessity of
being Catholic, and not merely English, Churchmen.

6

The Clergy and the Creeds.

standard of comparison by which the Christian,
individual or society, must test attainment, is not
at all the perceived or supposed failures of others ?
These men, he would have said,3 " measuring
themselves by themselves, and comparing them-
selves among themselves, are not wise."

Let me come to my point then.

There is no respect in which the English
Church has shown up so badly abroad as in the
matter of Doctrinal Unity. It is no more than the
truth to say that we have already lamentably
hindered the spread of the Christian I aith among
many races by the bewildering diversities of
teaching and method which we have presented to
them, and (taking a broad view of the prospects
of the English Church) that we must in the
future fall disastrously short of what God expects
of us and gives us the opportunity of doing,
unless we amend in this respect.

Nor has anybody a right to sneer at the idea
of the Anglican Church recovering her unity.
Looking at the matter from inside and in view of
the wonderful revival of spiritual life and truth
which has been going on within her, we are not
at all without encouragement. It requires no
blind and irrational optimism to maintain that
the Church is working back from within towards,
I do not say a rigid and narrow uniformity,
but an intelligible, and living, and coherent
unity. But to give us pause in these good hopes

3 2 Cor. x. 20.

The Clergy and the Creeds. J

there has appeared on the Church's horizon —
rather there has manifested itself in the very
centre of our life — a danger which I may call new
— a danger which threatens our very foundations,
by blurring all the clear issues of truth which
make doctrinal unity intelligible and possible.
A claim (which in its present shape is new) is
making itself heard. It was put forward, though
with hesitation and large reservations, by one who
seeks to disentangle what he thinks is " the
kernel " of spiritual truth from " the husk " of
traditional Christianity : 4 it has been put forward
more recently and more broadly as an accompani-
ment of what is to be "the New Reformation." 5
The claim is this : — That men should exercise
the Church's sacred ministry, and solemnly and
constantly, as the condition of its exercise, pro-
fess her creeds, while all the time the truths which
those creeds express with so much emphasis, are
openly (in their only intelligible sense) denied
or regarded as open questions.

The language of the creeds is stoutly positive,
and it may well be, as indeed seems to be the case,
that such a claim, which shocks our natural in-
stinct, will not at all commend itself to the con-
sciences of those unhappily alienated from the
faith, any more than " those within," and will pass
away as an eccentricity. " Even like as adreamwhen

4 On " The Kernel and the Husk," see Appendix, p. 35.

5 On Canon Fremantle's article, "Theology under its
Changed Conditions," see Appendix, p. 35.

8 The Clergy and the Creeds.

one awake tli so shalt thou make their image to
vanish out of the city." But the avowed object
is to destroy the distinctive, separate character
of the Christian Creed. " The Church of the
Future "is to " merge itself more and more in
general society, being ready, in the true spirit of
its Lord, to lose itself that it may save mankind."6
In the true spirit of its Lord ! of Him who would
not " commit Himself to any man because He knew
what was in man;" who let His Message seem
utterly to fail just because He would not bring it
down to the level of what "general society v could
appreciate. But that object, however strange
to the Christian sense, is the avowed one.
The hope is that without altering the distinctive
language of our creeds and prayers, custom may
familiarize us with its use in an unnatural sense.
The aim is to get the claim publicly expressed and
tacitly recognized. Our difficulty, says the first
writer referred to, " would be diminished, if not
altogether removed, by publicity." 7 " It is quite
possible," writes the second, " that what is a
puzzle to one generation will not be so to the
next." This is undoubtedly true. People will
get accustomed to the use of the highest language
in a quite unreal sense unless we purge ourselves
of it. We need to meet the challenge with a pro-
test so clear, so broad, so firm, that the verdict
of the Church's conscience shall be quite unrnis-

6 Canon Fremantle, p. 457.

7 " The Kernel and the Husk," p. 344.

The Clergy and the Creeds,

9

takable. Without that protest we become ac-
complices. It is not only the educated classes
who will become suspicious whether the clergy
believe what they assert. It is not too much to
say that if this new claim were acquiesced in, if
this new tendency were to spread, it would
threaten, more gravely than anything before it,
the cohesion of the Church at home and her
Missionary prospects abroad.

II.

Trinity Sunday is the Festival of Revelation.
It brings before us the very familiar truth that
Christianity is a Revelation of the Being and
Character of God. It is a Revelation, first of all, of
quite intelligible import.

Secondly, it is either a supernatural Revelation
or nothing substantial at all.

1. It is a Revelation of quite intelligible import.
It affects, of course, the nature and state of man8;

8 That is, it is a Revelation of his immortality, and his im-
mortality under certain conditions of life : it is also a Revelation
of his fallen state. See Robert Browning, " Gold Hair, A
Legend of Pornic."

" The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith may be false, I find.

I still, to suppose it true, for my part,

See reasons and reasons ; this to begin :
'Tis the faith that launched point blank her dart

At the head of a lie — taught Original Sin,
The corruption of man's heart."
It is of great importance to get people to see that this doctrine

io The Clergy and the Creeds.

but let that pass : it is much before that a Revela-
of the Being and Character of God. God (this
festival reminds us), the one and only self-sub-
sistent Being, exists eternally in three Persons.
The Church apologizes for the word Person.9 She

does not imply that man was created in full development and
has since gone backwards (see Canon Fremantle's quotation
from Rev. C. Fletcher, p. 450) ; so that Bacon and Shakespeare
would be " the rags of Adam." Let any one who thinks that
this is the Christian doctrine, read St. Athanasius' " C. Gentes,"
i.— viii. Christianity holds that man, when he was made in
God's image, was put upon right lines of development —
in a right relation to God — and by his own wilfulness tainted
his development by an element of moral disorder and consequent
decay. He still developed, but the development has been a
marred one, tainted with this moral disorder and decay, and
needing not only consummation, but also recovery. If any
one asks, what binds an English clergyman to hold the doctrine
of original sin, I point to the Article IX. and Scripture. I
may add that there is no alternative to it except the recogni-
tion that sin is according to God's will, a part of " Nature,"
or the abandonment of the Doctrine of Creation, for some
form of Manichseism. (See Mozley, " Lectures," &c. ix. x.)
But where is there any Church formula which has stereo-
typed the doctrine in what I may call its Miltonic form1?
The Bible is, in a unique sense, the book of development. It
looks forward not backward. I should like on this subject to
refer to Mr. Holland's " Solidarity of Salvation," in his new
volume, " Creed and Character." It is important also to notice
that the early Christian teachers hold that Death was, from the
first, natural to man's physical organism (see Athanasius, "De In-
carnatione," iv.). His deliverance from it would have been
supernatural. It belonged to his physical nature. See Cotterill,
"Does Science aid Faith V cap. 10.

9 This guarding of the sense of the term " Person " is a com-
monplace of Theology. But popular language and art no doubt
often lay us open to the scoffs of Mr. Matthew Arnold.

The Clergy and the Creeds. 1 1

explains that it does not mean separate indi-
viduals. But man " has no celestial language/5
and she must take the best word at her disposal.
God exists, and His Existence as Living, Loving,
Willing, Conscious Spirit, involves in Himself Rela-
tions and Distinctions which come out into Revela-
tion in the Person of Jesus Christ, who manifested
God under the threefold name of Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost. And this Revelation of the Being of
God is made, if I may so speak, by the way. It
would appear to be made inevitably, in the process
and for the sake of revealing His Character.
Christianity is the Revelation that God is Love.
Just for a moment let me emphasize how dis-
tinctly this is a Revelation — that is, a further
unveiling of the Character of God than any we can
derive from "Nature."1 There is, the men of
science tell us, one Force in Nature : our mind

1 As to the use of the word " Nature " with reference to the
supernatural and to the miraculous, I can refer to nothing better
than St. Augustine's words, " C. Faust." book xxvi. cap. 3 : " We
may, without incongruity, say that God does in a manner con-
trary to Nature what He does contrary to Nature as we know it.
For what we mean by ' Nature ' is this well-known and customary
order, and it is when God does anything contrary to this that
His actions are called miracles or wonders. But as for that
supreme law of Nature, which is beyond the perception of men,
either because they are impious or because they are still weak
in knowledge — against this God no more acts than He acts
against Himself. And God's spiritual and rational creatures,
amongst whom are men, the more they become participators in
that immutable law and light, the more clearly they can see
what can happen and what cannot ; and the further off, on the
other hand, they arc (from that Divine law and light), so much

I 2

The Clergy and the Creeds.

may compel us to recognize that this Force is no
blind Force, but conscious Intelligence working
with Design. The witness of Conscience, as a
fact however evolved, may drive us to acknow-
ledge in this Universal and Intelligent Being, a
Moral Will. But all this, even if it be granted,
does not amount to the Revelation of Love.

" Conjecture of the worker by the work :
Is there strength there % Enough : intelligence 1
Ample : but goodness in a like degree ?
Not to the human eye in the present state,
An Isoscele deficient in the base.
What lacks there of Perfection fit for God
But just the instance which this tale supplies
Of love without a limit *? So is strength,
So is intelligence ; let love be so,
Unlimited in its self-sacrifice,
Then is the tale true as God shows complete.
Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark,
Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands." 2

Yes : granted Intelligence and Moral Will in the
Being whom Nature partly reveals and still more
conceals, still we should be without (I do not say,
some intimations, but without) the Revelation of
His Love. But could we, in the face of so much
to make against it, say our confident Credo in
the God of Natural Religion, apart from the God
of Grace ? At least the act of Faith which makes

the more they are astonished at what they are not accustomed
to, in proportion as they are blind to what is coming."

Again, " Grace is not the negation of nature, but it is rather
the restoration of nature." See in a similar sense, Bishop
Butler, " Analogy," book i. cap. 1 (at the end).

2 Browning, " The Ring and the Book," vol. iv. p. 60.

The Clergy and the Creeds.

]3

us believe in an intelligent Creator and Moral
Governor of the world, requires no increase to
make us believe in Christ. And those who regard
the Christian Faith as unreasonable will not
mostly grant us more than a universal Force.
Now the Christian believes that God is the
universal Force. " Deus," the Church prays,
" rerum tenax vigor ! " 3 But this is only the
starting-point of his Creed. Its essence is that
God is Love. Forgive my emphasizing so lumi-
nous a matter as that this Revelation of the
Character of God has a quite distinctive meaning
and a quite priceless importance. That God is
Love — that all that seems so blind, so cruel, so
remorseless, so inexorable in the system of Nature
is controlled by the Will of One who, behind all
and in all, is Perfect Love, and calls us one and all
into fellowship and co-operation with Himself —
this is a truth which, once believed, turns all
misery into joy, and failure for God into triumph
and hope. It is no substitute for it to recognize
(as has been suggested recently, for " the theo-
logians of the new epoch") that we can "speak
of God as just and loving, since the Supreme
Power ex hypothesi includes mankind, the leading
portion of the world, with all its noblest ideals." 4
By the love of God I mean something much more
all-embracing, more profound than the love of man

3 The Hymn for the Ninth Hour. The idea finds full
expression in the Doctrine of the Logos as the Fathers teach it.

4 Canon Fremantle's article (see Appendix), p. 454.

14 The Clergy and the Creeds.

who is made in God's image. It is just when the
best human love fails or is powerless that the
need of Divine Love comes in. " When my father
and my mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me
up." The belief then that God is Love is most
distinctive. It finds no reasonable substitute,
though it does find a witness, in the recognition
that there is love in humanity. And the con-
ception of an eternal and inscrutable energy in
all things, is no more an equivalent for it than
the presence of a mysterious stranger makes up
to a child for the absence of his mother.

2. Christianity is a supernatural Revelation
or nothing substantial at all. What I mean is
this : — There are a great number of discoveries
revealed in the order of Nature by man to
man which are quite independent of their in-
ventors. Once made they become the property
of the race, and we are not at all affected by
any demonstration that their supposed authors
are little but myths. It is not so with the
substance of the Christian Revelation. That
God is Triune, is indeed a truth which corresponds
to the requirement of a Revelation made by the
last representative of spiritual philosophy in
Germany. " If reason," says Hermann Lotze, " is
not of itself capable of finding the highest truth,
but on the contrary stands in need of a Revela-
tion which is either contained in some Divine act
of historic occurrence, or is continually repeated
in men's hearts, still reason must be able to un-

The Clergy and the Creeds.

15

derstand the revealed truth, at least so far as to
recognize in it the satisfying and convincing con-
clusion of those upward-soaring trains of thought
which reason itself began, led by its own needs,
but was not able to bring to an end." 5

To this claim the Christian Eevelation corre-
sponds. It is rationally credible.6

5 " Microcosmus," vol. ii. p. 660 (Eng. trans.).

6 This might be put in different ways : —

(1) If we trace out the idea that all life involves self-ex-
pression or self-realization, we are led up to the truth of the
Logos. The perfect life must have its perfect self-expression.
If the Eternal and Absolute Being is Will and Reason and
Love, this postulates relationship in the Eternal Being— the
eternal relationship of Subject and Object. So only is God
complete in Himself. Immensus Pater in Filio Mensnratus :
Mensura Patris Filius (Irenaeus).

(2) The truth that the highest life we know is the most
differentiated, points in the same direction. Man's spiritual
being is in the image of God, and Plato, trying to express his
spiritual nature is driven to a Trinitarian metaphor. " Re-
public," ix. 588. D., " avvaTTTC avra eis eu rpca <Wa."

(3) "VVe may recognize how little difficulty we feel in ac-
cepting what is part of experience, however little we are able
to express it (e.g. the relation of soul and body : or of will and
feeling and reason in ourselves, so often contradictory, yet so
completely one). The Doctrine of the Trinity does become an
element of experience, granted Christ's language in general to be
historical and trustworthy. I suppose it would be true to say
that philosophy finds more difficulty about the " Personality "
of God than about the Trinity. " The doctrine of the Trinity
thus regarded is rather a concession to our reasonable and in-
tellectual nature, than a stumbling-block to it." (Mozley's
" Lectures," Mysterious Truths, p. 112). Coleridge and Maurice
are good instances of converts from Unitarianism on rational
grounds.

1 6 The Clergy and the Creeds.

But its whole force and security depend on a
" Divine act of historic occurrence," on the his-
torical character of Jesus Christ. I believe that
God is Three in One, in the last resort simply
because Christ's whole language postulates a
certain complex relationship on His part to the
Father and the Holy Ghost, and impressed itself
in this sense upon His Apostles. His language
is only intelligible on the postulate of a Trinity.
We necessarily believe in the Threefold God in
believing Christ to be the Only-begotten Son of
God. Christ did not proclaim the Trinity as an
abstract dogma. He simply brought It into
notice in speaking about Himself and the Father,
and the Paraclete. In the knowing Him we
come to know the relationships in God, in the
same sort of way as in coming to know any-
thing, we come to know its relationships. But
then it follows that our only real ground for
believing in the Trinity is because Christ is be-
lieved to be what He claimed to be, One who came
from behind the veil which shrouds the " un-
known God," and revealed His Being. Just in
the same way and for the same cause, only if Jesus
Christ reveals God, do we know that God is Love.
There are no arguments in the Gospel that prove
that God is Love. There is no explanation of all
the facts that, taken in and by themselves, might
make against Divine Love. The Eevelation of it is
a Eevelation in fact. If it be true that Christ
came from out the Bosom of the Father, and

The Clergy and the Creeds.

17

that " he that hath seen Him, hath seen the
Father," then, whatever we may doubt, we cannot
donbt that God is Love. Christ is, beyond all
question, self-sacrificing Love. But He only re-
veals that God is Love if His Character is the
Character of God : otherwise He proves no more
than any other of the myriad lovers of their
race.

I believe, then, that God is Love, as I could
not have believed it on the authority of any
number of bright angels who might have worked
miracles to assure me of it, because Christ
claimed to be the Son of God, the Revealer of
God, who came forth from His innermost Being
to make plain His Character in the intelligible
form of human self-sacrifice : who argued not
at all, but did what is so much more convincing
than all argument — took all that makes against
Divine Love, all the unmerited pain and failure
and rejection which make up

" The weary and the heavy weight
Of all this unintelligible world " —

took it and clothed Himself in it — made it the
Instrument of Divine self-sacrifice, the Instru-
ment of Redemption, and then out of utter-
most failure manifested the Truth of His claim
to be the very Life, by His Resurrection from the
Dead.

Yes. If there be a Common Lordship in the
moral and physical world ; if the physical world
really and fundamentally serves the purposes of

B

1 8 The Clergy and the Creeds.

Divine Love — then it must recognize its Lord
manifest in the flesh. He must manifest His
supremacy over Death.7 " It was not possible
that He should be holden of it." " He was
declared to be Son of God in power by the
Resurrection from the Dead." The whole Chris-
tian Creed is a Eevelation which depends upon
Christ's Person being recognized as Divine, and
His claim is staked upon the reality of His
Resurrection.

This, then, is the Christian Creed, as the
Nicene symbol states it. It is a belief by impli-
cation in the Blessed Trinity. It is that because
it is primarily a belief in Christ's Person. It
lays all stress on His being Very God — incarnate
under supernatural conditions, though under con-
ditions which put His Incarnation into continuity
with all His previous operations in the world.
It stakes His claim on the reality of the fact that
He rose the third day from the Dead according
to the Scriptures, and ascended in our humanity
glorified and spiritualized8 into that highest sphere
of Being which the Scriptures call the Right
Hand of God, and shall come again to Judge the
Quick and the Dead.

7 This is the Christian idea about Christ's Resurrection.
Granted that He is what none other is — the very Word made
flesh, His Resurrection comes to be natural in His case : Kara
tt)v evXoyov aKoXovOlav. Athanasius, De Inc. xxxi. § 4.

8 " Spiritual " in the New Testament is never opposed to
material, but to carnal. Milligan, "Resurrection," note 15 (at
the end). Christ's Body is still material, but no doubt under

The Clergy and the Creeds.

19

III.

This is the Christian Creed. It is, we must
recognize, an incomplete Revelation — a Revela-
tion which, while it gives us all that we can need
to make faith sure, and hope firm, and love active,
leaves a great many questions, which intellectual
curiosity suggests, unanswered. It leaves the
greatest Christians bowed in awful silence before
the unfathomable depths of the Divine Being. We
are under the discipline of ignorance. We
' ' know in part:" we see " in a mirror:" the
communication is in terms of mystery, "in a
riddle.' ' It has reference much more to our
present duty and to present grace than to giving
us any clear pictures of what shall be or what has
been. Again the Revelation, within its own area,
does not exclude all difference of opinion. The
Church in the second century embraced men of
very different mental temperaments — a Clement
and an Irenasus — and it should not be narrowed
as it comes down the ages. St. Augustine can
recognize that inside the limits of what is
authoritative there is room for difference and
mutual toleration.

" Cyprian," he says, " and those with him,

conditions utterly raised above the limitations of ei bodies " as
we know them. Science at least helps us to an immense exten-
sion and freedom in our conception of what is still material.
" We shall see Him," but with a vision relative to His glory,
not our present sight. See Benson's " Life beyond the Grave,"
pp. 22—29.

B 2

20 The Clergy and the Creeds.

walking in most persistent toleration, remained
in unity with those who taught differently from
them " on the matter, that is, of the validity of
Sacraments administered by heretics. c< Being
most largely endowed with the holy bowels of
Christian charity, he thought we ought to remain
in Christian unity with those who differed from,,
ourselves, on a matter where there was no clear
decision of the universal Church. " All these
Catholic unity embraces in her motherly breast,
bearing each other's burdens in turn, and endea-
vouring to keep the unity of the spirit in the
bond of peace." 9

It is the old motto : — In necessariis unitas : in
dubiis libertas : in omnibus charitas. If you
come to the questions of our own time, it is, of
course, noticeable that the Church has no defini-
tion of Inspiration, and while affirming it real,
and therefore claiming from her ministers a pro-
fession of their " unfeigned belief ' in the Inspired
Scriptures, makes no exacter requirements as to
its nature or limits.

It would be out of place here to discuss what
exactly seem to be the conditions of belief which
the Church of England imposes at least on her
clergy. But it is the Church's Divine instinct to
have focussed our faith in clear and unmistakable
definition on the Person of Christ. On that, at
any rate, the English branch of the Church insists
with a reiterated emphasis in Creeds and Articles.

9 " Be Baptismo," book ii. 2, 6, 7, 8.

The Clergy and the Creeds. 2 \

The clear Doctrine of the Incarnation, and the
Doctrine of the Trinity — which that involves — is
at the least what lies behind the differences
between representative Churchmen of the last
generation. " My dear Pusey," wrote Lord
Shaftesbury, after the publication of a volume
which anticipated the present tendency, " we will
fight (about divergent opinions) another day.
In this we must ' contend earnestly for the faith
once delivered to the saints ' and it must be done
together now." 10 " Do I understand you to say,"
Mr. Maurice was asked, ' 'that you desire the
Creeds, the Liturgy, the Articles to be taken as
tests of orthodoxy ? " 46 1 used this language,"
he replied, " simply, solemnly, deliberately." 1
" I cannot help feeling," wrote Mr. Kingsley to
Mr. Maurice, " that where the Articles assert a
proposition, e.g. the Trinity, they assert that that
and nothing else on the matter is true, and so bind
thought; and that they require me to swear that
I believe it so, and so bind my conscience. . . .
For myself, I can sign the Articles in their literal
sense toto corde, and subscription is no bondage
to me, and so I am sure can you." 2

IV.

Towaeds this Faith it seems possible to be in one
of three intelligible attitudes.

(1) We may believe it. We clergy have many

10 Hodder's " Life," vol. iii. p. 166.
1 "Life of F. D. Maurice," vol. i. p. 525.
3 " Life of Charles Kingsley," vol. ii. pp. 216, 217.

22

The Clergy and the Creeds.

sins and shortcomings to deplore. Our faithful-
ness has been sadly imperfect. We have little
cause to be proud of ourselves, perhaps. But
we are — the overwhelming majority of us — at
least quite sincere in our firm belief in what we
preach.3 Of course we recognize that in ages

3 At least, the author of "The Kernel and the Husk" urges,
the warning clauses of the Athanasian Creed are used in an
unreal sense. I do not admit this. They are used in a real sense,
though it may require balancing and guarding. I believe the
clause " which faith except every one do k eep whole and undefiled,
without doubt he shall perish everlastingly," in exactly the same
sense as I believe similar general propositions about moral offen-
ders. It needs guarding by the recognition that many men com-
mit a sin, whether of rejecting the truth, or of theft, in external
fact, without being really guilty of it. Guilt involves a certain
state of will. The sin does not lie in the act or word, but in the
will behind the act. A man is only a thief (in the eye of God)
if he knows he is stealing, or a rejecter of Christ's truth if he
is wilfully rejecting. But I believe that to reject the Divine
claim of Truth is as real a sin, and as truly brings death to the
soul, and separates as necessarily from eternal life, as committing
adultery. I am sure that if I myself, or one circumstanced as
I am, were to reject the Doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarna-
tion, I should "without doubt perish everlastingly," and this
means that all men who are really guilty of this sin (i e. who
reject not merely "materially" or in outward fact, but "formally,"
or in spirit) will perish in the same way. Those who have
none of ihe temper of rejection, of course do not "reject" in
the moral sense of the term. " God," says Hooker, " is said to
respect adverbs more than verbs." " Their ignorant fear and love
God who inspires it will accept." For them the waiting state
will be a period of illumination. The formulators of the Creed,
as Charles Kingsley loved to point out, believed in the interme-
diate state with intense reality. And it is literally true that no
one will enter into the final state of salvation without a right
knowledge as well as a right will. He will "think of the Trinity "
rightly. The Creed (and for this we owe it a great deal of

The Clergy and the Creeds. 2 3

of ignorance and superstition the Faith came
to be overlaid with many accretions which must
have fallen away in days of better education, no
doubt with more or less of shock to traditional
faith, but the Church did not (as some modern
writers are apt to assume) spread or formulate
her theology first of all in days of barbarism.
The Faith spread — it reached its explicit formula-
tion— in an atmosphere of Greek cultivation,
and, looking back to the Rule of Faith as it
was proclaimed by Irengeus, and recorded by
Origen,4 and vindicated by the formulators and
the maintainers of the Creeds, we find in it the
Catholic Faith, the Faith of Scripture, the whole
of which we are sure is permanent, adequate to
the needs of all races and of all generations. If

gratitude) emphasizes coincidence at the last resort of right
conduct and right intelligence. "They that have done good
shall go into life everlasting, and they that have done evil into
everlasting life." See Mr. Page Boberts, " Liberalism in Reli-
gion," Sermon vi.

If we are accused of interpreting the XXXIX Articles in an
unreal sense, I should reply that we interpret them in their real
sense, but that their real sense is frequently very indefinite.
The Creeds express decisions. The Articles often shelve ques-
tions rather than decide them. They avoid a clear issue rather
than press it. See Kingsley, "Life," vol ii. p. 217.

4 Dr. Bigg thus states Origen's conception of the Eule cf
Faith, Bampton Lecture, V. init. (p. 152) : We have already
seen what Origen regarded as the proper task of the Christian
philosopher. Tradition, embodying the teaching of the Apostles,
has handed down certain facts, certain usages, which are to be
received without dispute, but does not attempt to explain the
why or the whence. It is the office of the sanctified reason to
define, to articulate, to co-ordinate, even to expand and generally

24

The Clergy and the Creeds.

you tell us that the Ages of Faith 5 are past and
men of enlightenment will not much longer regard
the Christian Revelation as credible, first of all
we doubt the truth of this; but farther, if it should
come to be true, we could only go back to St.
Paul's warning : " Let no man deceive himself.

to adapt to human needs the faith once delivered to the Church.
What, then, is the utterance of Tradition 1 It tells us that
there is one God who created all things out of nothing, who
is Just and Good, the Author of the Old as of the New Testa-
ment, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: that Jesus Christ
was begotten of the Father before every creature, that through
Him all things were made, that He is God and Man, born of
the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, that He did truly sutler,
rise again, and ascend into heaven : that the Holy Ghost is
associated in honour and dignity with the Father and the
Son, that it is He who inspired the saints both of the Old and
of the New Dispensation : that there will be a resurrection of
the dead, when the body which is sown in corruption will rise
in incorruption, and that in the world to come the souls of men
will inherit eternal life or suffer eternal punishment according
to their works: that every reasonable soul is a free agent,
plotted against by evil spirits, comforted by good angels, but
in no way constrained : that the Scriptures were written by the
agency of the Spirit of God, that they have two senses, the
plain and the hidden, whereof the latter can be known only to
those to whom is given the grace of the Holy Spirit in the
word of wisdom and knowledge.

5 We speak of the " Ages of Faith." But the ready accept-
ance of the supernatural in those days was not in the majority of
cases anything near to real Christian Faith (cf. St. Bernard, In
Oct. Pasch. Serrn. i. § 3). Non-moral credulity is no nearer
Christian faith than many states of mind more natural to our
time. An " Age of Faith " in the Christian sense there never
probably has been or will be. "When the Son of Man cometh,
shall He find faith on the earth 1 "

The Clergy and the Creeds, 25

If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this
world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise."
If intelligence abandons faith, it will be so much
the worse for intelligence. For ourselves, we
hold our faith, without any obscurantism, in the
li^ht of all that we can know. So far as it is his-
torical, we point with great reassurance to the
way in which the Evangelic Record and Apostolic
Epistles6 have emerged from the war of criticism
which has assailed them this last fifty years, and
we ask where in Europe you will find a criticism
so impartial, so free, so strong, so learned, as
the criticism of those great Cambridge divines
to whom, more than to any other men, the Church
of our generation owes the vindication of her
Apostolic documents ?

We believe our Creed, then, as reasonable men,
and as faithful men we only ask the liberty to
take it where it is wanted. If the educated were
to reject it, we would take it to the poor. If
Europe should apostatize, we would take it to Asia
or to Africa. Only leave it to us unimpaired —
that Creed, which is the secret of character — to
gather those who are " Christ's sheep," and have
" ears to hear," under the feet of Christ " till He
come."

6 Old Testament criticism is no doubt still a field of great
•uncertainty. But the evidences of our faith rest upon the New
Testament (primarily) and upon the New Testament critically
treated as a collection of documents claiming to convey history.
See Bishop Clifford in Fortnightly Review of Jan., 1887. (Reply
to Mr. Yoysey).

26

The Clergy and the Creeds.

(2) It is possible to disbelieve the Creed. Dis-
believers must always face the tremendous claims,
the tremendous warnings of Jesus Christ. To us
they seem to leave out of account in their
philosophy, the most significant facts of the moral
consciousness and the spiritual history of man-
kind. Bat it is not ours, as the Apostle tells us,
" to judge them that are without." " Them
that are without God judges." 7 There are " first
who shall be last, and last who shall be first."

We indeed must sadly recognize how often it has
been our misstatement of the Gospel of God which
has prejudiced their minds against it and brought
their blood on our heads. Verily we are guilty con-
cerning our brothers. But at least this attitude of
professed unbelief has in it something intelligible
and something even hopeful. " God concluded
all," said St. Paul, " under unbelief that He might
have mercy upon all." At least frank unbelief,
whether it is content to remain merely negative, or
whether it takes shape in attempts to provide a
substitute for the Christian religion, at least will
emphasize to the consciousness of men those moral
needs to which the message of the Church alone
corresponds. When men have once fairly broken
with the Faith they begin to find out what they
have lost.

(3) Once more, it is possible for men to remain
towards the Christian Faith in an attitude be-
tween belief and unbelief — in an attitude of
doubt. " How long," they cry to Christ, like His

* 1 Cor. v. 12, 13.

The Clergy and the Creeds.

27

contemporaries, " how long dost Thou keep us in
suspense ? If Thou be the Christ, tell us
plainly." 8 To this appeal He did not, He will
not respond He will provide grounds which
make faith reasonable : He will not provide forcible
proofs which dispense with its exercise. He
deliberately appeals to, and welcomes, and meets
with His Benediction, the venture of Faith.
Doubters, then, are largely men who omit to take
into account the important, the dominant place
held in human life by the self-committing insight
of Faith. How much they lose by living sceptical
lives, they themselves are witnesses. Meanwhile,
our 'e God who for the more confirmation of the
Faith did suffer the Holy Apostle Thomas to be
doubtful in His Son's Resurrection," may work
good through their hesitancy and reward by
clearer light what is often in large part an honest
and sincere refusal to let spiritual expediency
override the claims of truth, as it appears to
them : a half-hearted fear lest the Revelation of
Christ be too good to be true.

But there is a fourth attitude now proposed to
us towards the Christian Creed which has none
of the intelligibility, none of the justification,
which belongs to the others. It is not the atti-
tude of the hypocrite — who professes to believe
what in heart he denies — but it is the frank claim
to make public and solemn professions of dogmatic
belief in what is with equal publicity either utterly
denied or declared uncertain. It is the claim to
8 St. John x. 24.

28 The Clergy and the Creeds.

adopt one tone in literature and a quite inconsis-
tent tone in church ; to appeal to God in the
language of solemn supplication or adoration in
virtue of facts which are, under other circum-
stances, declared incredible.

One writer thinks that previous declaration of
opinion, and a general understanding, will enable
those who agree with him to say, Cfi I believe that
the only-begotten Son of God was born of the
Virgin Mary," though he writes that " there may
have been a time when this illusion of His miracu-
lous Conception did more good than harm", but
" in these days it seems to me fraught with evil";
though he speaks of "the untruth that Jesus was
not the son of Joseph " ; or again, " I believe that
He rose again the third day according to the
Scriptures," though he is sure His material Body
rotted in the grave —

" If not where Joseph laid Him first, why then
Where other men
Translaid Him after." 9

Another writer 1 more boldly claims to re-
concile the recitation of the Creeds, which are
nothing if not dogmatic, with the complete repu-
diation of the idea of an authoritative Revelation,
and the consequent position that we cannot make
dogmatic assertions about the Personality of God,
or the Creation of the world, or personal immor-
tality.

9 "The Kernel and the Husk," pp. 279, 280.
1 Canon Fremantle. See Appendix.

The Clergy and the Creeds.

29

Oh let the conscience of men awake ! The
Christian Creed is a quite distinct and intelligible
thing. If its reality is gone we shall gain nothing
and lose everything by retaining its language.
We shall gain nothing, for the words become but
hollow echoes ringing with a hideous mockery in
the ears of those who desire the support of truth :
we shall lose everything because we introduce
into the highest part of our life an atmosphere of
unreality which will have an influence (depend
upon it) on its other departments, undermining
everywhere the foundation of reality and truth-
fulness, and which will appear in grosser form in
less academic circles, —

Hoc fonte derivata clades

In patriam populumque fluxit.

" Oh," men have cried, " for one hour of
Socrates ! " Oh for one hour of Pascal to set to
work upon our new casuistry! Oh, much more, for
one hour of the great Apostle to smite with his
flaming sword of sincerity and truth !

We make our appeal in two quarters. We
appeal to the conscience of thoughtful men. Mr.
John Morley cannot, I fear, be reckoned among
believers in Jesus Christ, but he can be reckoned
among men to whom " it makes all the difference
in the world whether we put Truth in the first
place or in the second place."

In almost prophetic tones he warns Englishmen
of what has become an inveterate national cha-
racteristic, " a profound distrust of general prin-

30

The Clergy and the Creeds.

ciples ; a profound dislike both of much reference
to them, and of any disposition to invest them
with practical authority ; a silent and most per-
tinacious measurement of philosophic truths by
political tests." 2 " The consequences of ... •
putting immediate social convenience in the first
place and respect for truth in the second, are
seen," he says, " in a distinct and unmistakable
lowering of the bent of public life ; a slack and
lethargic quality about public opinion; a growing
predominance of material, temporary, and selfish
aims, over those which are generous, far-reaching,
and spiritual ; a deadly weakening of intellectual
conclusiveness, of clear-shining moral illumina-
tion ; and, lastly, of a certain stoutness of self-
respect for which England was once famous. A
plain categorical proposition is becoming less and
less credible to average minds ; or, at least, the
slovenly willingness to hold two directly con-
tradictory propositions at one and the same time
is becoming more and more common."

" Why do we say that intellectual self-respect
is not vigorous, nor the sense of intellectual re-
sponsibility and truthfulness and coherency quick
and wakef ul among us ? Because so many people,
even among those who might be expected to
know better, insist on the futile attempt to re-
concile the incompatible courses of belief and
disbelief," and do their best " to keep society for
an indefinite time sapped by hollow and void pro-

3 " On Compromise," pp. 4, 14, 105, 145.

The Clergy and the Creeds. 3 1

fessions, instead of being nourished by sincerity
and whole-heartedness."

Who can speak words truer than these ? They
do not come, alas ! from a Christian prophet, but
John Morley can at least help us to guard the
moral foundations of life against the inroads
of a disastrous " compromise."

We make also another appeal. It is to Church-
men. A society which exists not primarily to
seek truth, or to keep society together, or to make
men comfortable, but to bear witness to a " once-
for-all delivered Faith," and preach a Gospel of
specific good tidings given in the Incarnation, Birth,
Death, and Resurrection of the Son of God, cannot
welcome into its ministry with any show of reason,
men who are content, indeed, to use its language
but only if they may repudiate its meaning.

No society can do this with common self-
respect. We need from the Church of England a
plain and explicit expression of her mind such as
shall make clear her determination to hold at all
costs to the truth of the Revelation which is her
only ground of existence.

Some among us are gravely disquieted at the
present time by the quite unscripfcural bondage
of the Church of England in spiritual matters to
courts which are purely secular. Within the last
few years a conscientious inability to recognize
their claim to spiritual jurisdiction has issued in
results of a very unexpected and distressing
nature. But great issues are at stake, and we
are rightly exhorted to have patience,

32

The Clergy and the Creeds.

" List, Christian warrior, thou whose heart is fain
To loose thy Mother from her present chain.
Christ will avenge His Bride, yet ere He save
Thy lot shall be the grave."

"We must be patient, but it is on one condition :
that we are not asked to sit still for fear of dis-
turbing the present position of the Church, while
all the time the very foundations of her doctrine
are being undermined boldly and without rebuke.
This would be in a terrible sense

Propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.3
George Herbert in his " Church Militant," pre-
sents us with the picture of the Church moving
round the world, doing its work in the East, and
then failing before the Muslim ; passing to the
West in its mediseval glory, and there, too, as it
seemed to him, sinking into secularity ; laying its
hold on England, and here in turn swamped in sin
and covetousness.

" For gold and grace did never yet agree,
Religion always sides with poverty."

3 Mr. Gladstone, writing to Bishop Wilberforce in 1857,
uses these words : " The present position of the Church of
England is gradually approximating to the Erastian theory that
the business of an Establishment is to teach all sorts of doctrines
and to provide Christian ordinances by way of comfort for all
sorts of people, to be used at their own option. It must become, if
uncorrected, in lapse of time a thoroughly immoral position. . . .
The condition of the Church with respect to doctrine is gradually
growing into an offence to the moral sense of mankind. ... I
feel certain that the want of combined and responsible eccle-
siastical action is one of the main evils." "Life of Bishop
Wilberforce," vol. ii. pp 353 sq.

The Clergy and the Creeds,

33

So in his day it seemed to him —

" Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand."

George Herbert's anticipations were greatly
falsified. So may be, so (shall I say?) will be,
the anticipations of the prophets of evil for the
Church in our time. But at least we are bound,
so far, to anticipate C£ National Apostasy," as to
recognize its possibility, and to make it quite clear
that at any rate we will hand on to other nations
and other times the torch alight — the city having
foundations ; that at least if we will not drink of
the waters of life, we will not foul them with our
feet.

We are looking back over the fifty years of Queen
Victoria's reign. We are thanking God as for
much done, so for the revival of Mission zeal in
Churchmen and for the sacred memory of the
many who have given their lives to the spread of
the Church, even down to George Hervey Swinny,
just added to the blessed band who have been
witnesses for the Gospel unto death in Central
Africa. But even while we give God thanks for
all this recovered life and happy self-sacrifice, we
must not be blind to our perils. " Because, even
because, they cry peace, and there is no peace ;
and one builds up a wall, and lo, others daub it
with untempered mortar." There are times when
Christians love to dwell not so much on the
conspicuous triumphs of the Church, as on her
moments of seeming weakness : on Elijah in the

c

34

The Clergy and the Creeds.

desert, feeling himself alone ; on Isaiah concen-
trating all his hopes on the faithful " remnant ; "
on St. Paul in prison, when everything seemed
to be going wrong, and all " sought their own,
not the things of Jesus Christ ;" on Athanasius
against the world ; aye, more than all, on Jesus
Christ failing for faithfulness' sake and 6i for-
saken " on the cross. It is not because we find
in our present circumstances anything which
calls for an exceptional measure of loyalty or
courage : still less is it in order that we may
nurse ourselves in melancholy, murmuring in the
spirit of the disconsolate king, —

" For heaven's sake let's sit upon the ground,
And tell strange stories of the deaths of kings."

But it is because we find in such scenes what
quickens our most radiant hopes, what is the very
inspiration of confidence — the assurance that God
works His triumphs through methods which do
not command majorities or presage success ; the
assurance that victory lies with the complete
Truth.

Christ our adorable Master has given us no
guarantee that His Faith will not be rejected by
Englishmen, as it once was by the Jews, but He
has given us a pledge that, though the gates of
death may seem to engulf the Church, they shall
not prevail against it ; and meanwhile as He sits
in the glory of God Who on earth was the Faithful
Witness, He asks only one thing of the stewards of
His Mysteries — " that a man be found faithful"

APPENDIX

On " The Kernel and the Husk : Letters on Spiritual Chris-
tianity," by the author of "Philochristus" and "Onesimus."
Also on an article by the Hon. and Rev. Canon Fremantle,
in the Fortnightly Review of March, 1887, entitled "The
New Reformation. Part ii., Theology under its Changed
Conditions."

I am not proposing to myself any general criticism of " The Kernel
and the Husk; " I am only concerned with it from the particular
point of view mentioned in this sermon. The author desires to
relax the accepted conditions of Ordination and Ministry in the
Church of England. He has been brought to this with great
hesitation (p. 348). He now makes his claim with great reser-
vations. The candidate for Holy Orders, or the clergyman who,
having lost part of his former creed, still desires to continue his
Ministry, must really believe that Jesus is the Eternal Son of
God and the proper object of worship (p. 361). But he is to
be dispensed from believing in Miracles, this is the point of the
claim. Now the Creed and Articles (ii. and iv.) emphasize two
Miracles in the plainest sense : The Miraculous Birth of our
Lord and His Physical Resurrection with the consequent Ascen-
sion. The words of the Articles are : " He took again His body
with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection
of man's nature." The Bible again not only records, but in some
cases emphasizes Miracles. So do the Church Services. The
candidate for Holy Orders is required to " assent to the Thirty-
nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer," as a condition
of his Ordination : he must profess his " unfeigned belief " in
Holy Scripture : the Ministry is exercised only in virtue of con-
stant and public recitation of the Creeds. Yet it is proposed
that a man who emphatically rejects the Virgin Birth and
Physical Resurrection shall be ordained or shall continue to
exercise his Ministry (pp. 278 ft, p. 256, Letters 21—23). The
difficulty which this involves, the author expresses in part with
great clearness (pp. 344 — 346). " It is one thing, in my judg-
ment, to repeat the prayers of the Church and to read passages
from the sacred books of the Church, as the mouthpiece of the

C 2

36

Appendix.

congregation, and rather a different thing to stand up and say —
not only as the mouthpiece of the congregation, but in your
individual character, as a Christian and as a priest as well — ' I
believe this or that,' and to take money for so saying ; while all
the time you are saying under your breath, ' But I only believe
it metaphorically ' " (p. 346).

How does he propose to meet this difficulty % By " publicity"
and a " general understanding" (pp. 344 — 348), and in the
case of future ordinations by the acquiescence of the Bishops.
They are, in fact, to dispense men, so as to allow them to say
the Creed without believing the Miracles they assert (pp. 360 —
361). There comes into one's mind on reading this proposal an
echo of language not wanting in strength about a dispensing
power which is supposed to be exercised in another Com-
munion.

Canon Fremantle's Article appears to go further.

It is written in view of what he conceives to be the necessity
that "theology should strike boldly into the new paths (i.e. the
paths opened out by the 1 new conditions ' of knowledge under
which we live), not reverting to unfruitful methods which
separate theology from other parts of human knowledge. ' '

The "new conditions" are then passed in review. "They
are (1) those inspired by the advance of science and (2) of
criticism ; (3) those caused by the altered state of Church life
(4) those caused by social and democratic progress."

How does Canon Fremantle estimate their effect ? It seems
to be fairly expressed by saying that they have made the idea
of a supernatural authoritative Revelation untenable. Revela-
tion is necessarily a ground of certitude. If God has revealed
Himself we can make (within the limit of that revelation)
dogmatic or positive statements about Him. The essence of
Revelation is a positive Message, coming on Divine authority
and with Divine security, " a faith once for all delivered." The
Bible, and the Creeds which summarize the Bible Message,
are thus rightly dogmatic in their tone — that is, they assert
positively and simply what God has revealed in His Son. Thus
Revelation is that " Divine Word " of security, which Plato
makes Simmias desire so pathetically, when he felt the fallibility
of human arguments on the subject of the immortality of the
soul (Pheedo, 85). Revelation gives an authoritative and positive

Appendix.

37

communication, a glorious Gospel: and Faith, relative to such a
revelation, implies nothing if not certitude.

" Belief," says Mr. Page Roberts,1 " is not a mode of proba-
bility, it is a complete supreme act which fills the mind and
moves it to confident action. Belief is the grasp of the whole
nature, of head and heart combined ; it is certitude, well put in
the words of St. Paul, ' I know in whom I have believed' " On
the other hand, induction from mere experience of our present
state, arguments from our present knowledge, give at best only
hopes, prospects, possibilities. This is the state to which
Canon Fremantle would reduce us. Criticism, as he accounts it,
has destroyed the basis of a historical Revelation. We are
back where Plato was. We are all together in a common
search after the character of the unknown God. What is the
nature of the universal energy % Is it Personal % How did the
world come into being % What are we to suppose about spheres
of life other than those known to us by experience, such as
Plato dreamt of, a Heaven or a Hell? What was the nature
of Christ % On all these profound and interesting questions we
may have opinions and hopes, but no certainty. We can no
longer take " statements ready-made from Scripture " (pp. 454
— 455). We must do the best we can for ourselves.

I do not think I can be misinterpreting Canon Fremantle.
This is the unmistakable import of what he says. It is not the
denial that this or that truth is part of Revelation ; it is not the
assertion of this or that particular heresy ; it is the denial of
the whole Idea of Revelation. Then he speaks (p. 454) of
" questions which admit of no solution, such as the eternity of
matter, or the origin of the world, or the possibilities of other
spheres of life than those known to us by experience." This
language seems unambiguous. These questions (e.g. about
heaven or hell, " other spheres of life than those known to us
by experience ") are only insoluble if a Revelation of the Being
of God or the destiny of man given by One coming from behind
the veil of the unseen world, is actually out of the question.

Again : we are warned of the danger of certainty about
personal immortality. It is to be a hope not a certainty. It is
rightly pointed out (p. 456) that Christ did bring "immortality

1 " Liberalism in Religion," p. 81.

38

Appendix.

to light." " After the confirmation it received by the assurance
of Christ's resurrection, it became a kind of passionate certitude.
The history of the Church, however, shows how such a passion
may become a great danger and source of corruption ; and we
may expect that the theologians of the future will substitute
the ' words thrown out at a great subject ' for the certitude and
definitions of the past. Immortality will be to them a great
background of hope beyond the scene of present duty." A hope,
not a certitude ; and this manifestly not because the certainty
of immortality does us harm ; for Canon Fremantle is not an
obscurantist who would conceal what is true, for purposes of
edification. He means of course that the grounds on which the
Apostles reached this certitude have vanished. We have no
certain Eevelation. We can hope, but not assert.

So it is about the character of God. If Christ reveals God
as He is, so that seeing Christ is seeing God ; of course we can
dogmatically assert that God is Personal, i.e. that He is such a
Being as can reveal the Divine Will and Love, as it is, through
the will and love of the man Christ Jesus. We can also dog-
matically assert that He is the Creator, and that He exists
independently of all things as well as in all things, supposing
that He has revealed Himself as the Absolute Being, and we
have accepted His Revelation. But if all this is not the case,
we are thrown back on "un grand peut-etre." This is Canon
Fremantle's position. It is not certain whether the theologians
of the future will " endeavour to think of a transcendental
God," " they will not quarrel with those who think of the
Supreme Power rather after the analogy of Force or Law than
according to the strict idea of Personality " (p. 454; cf. p. 445).

This is Canon Fremantle's position. I am not here con-
cerned to argue with it. With some of his positions, as for
example "that it would be perilous to rest any belief upon a
supposition that the theory of evolution, even in its full compass,
will be disproved " (p. 445), I should be very sorry to disagree.
With the main drift of his argument I am of course in thorough
disagreement. My point is here only to estimate the attitude in
which his argument puts him to the Christian religion as the
Church of England holds it. Canon Fremantle says of those
who think with him: "We shall not find any great difficulty in

Appendix.

39

the language of the prayers and other formularies of any of the
Christian denominations," therefore not in the formularies of
the Church of England, of which he is a Canon. My contention
is that his whole position is in flat contradiction to those
formularies — especially the Creed. It is not merely that I
suppose Canon Fremantle holds with the author of " The
Kernel and the Husk " about the Miraculous Birth and Resur-
rection of Christ. He presumably denies that we have sufficient
reason for believing or affirming any miracle to have occurred.
I cannot otherwise interpret his language (p. 445). Moreover,
he speaks in disparagement of the portions of the Evangelical
narratives which record the Virgin Birth, and interprets the
Resurrection spiritually (p. 456). If " little stress will be laid
on the accounts of the infancy of Christ," we have no adequate
grounds for saying, " I believe that He was bom of a Virgin."
If the Resurrection of Christ is to be interpreted of His spiritual
Personality, clothed in the new "house which is from heaven,"
it would seem to be implicitly denied that in His material body
He rose again, or that anything at all happened to Him "on
the third day."

But we may go much deeper than this. He repudiates any
such knowledge of God as can be expressed in dogmas, i.e. he
repudiates all that makes a creed possible. The Athanasian
Creed, he says, "where intelligible, recalls the age of contro-
versies and condemnations " (p. 458). It does not do this in
any sense in which the Mcene Creed does not do so also. The
Nicene Creed is nothing except a definitive decision of a contro-
versy in virtue of a Divine Revelation.2 No one can say, "I
believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and
Earth, and of all things visible and invisible," or " I believe in

2 " In speaking of Gibbon's wTork to me," writes Mr. Froude
of Thomas Carlyle, " he made one remark which is worth re-
cording. In earlier years he had spoken contemptuously of the
Athanasian controversy, of the Christian world torn in pieces
over a diphthong : and he would ring the changes in broad
Annandale on the Homoousion and the Homozousion. He
now told me that he perceived Christianity itself to have been
at stake. If the Arians had won, it would have dwindled away
to a legend." — "Thomas Carlyle : Life in London," vol. ii. p. 462.

4Q

Appendix,

the Resurrection of the body and the Life everlasting," who
regards " the eternity of matter,3 the origin of the world, the
possibilities of other spheres of life than those known to us by
experience," as " questions which admit of no solution." No
one can say, "I believean the only-begotten Son of God, of one
substance with the Father," and at the same time " put aside
the long controversies which began in the third century about
the Nature of Christ " (p. 455). He is simply affirming the
dogmatic decision of the first of those controversies. No one
who thinks that the conditions of thought " will make men
much more cautious in framing dogmas about his (Christ's)
divinity," and who understands by His divinity only " His moral
supremacy as a spiritual power," can say, " I believe in the
only-begotten Son of God, God of God, very God of very God."
All these are permanent dogmas, not " words thrown out at a
great subject" (p. 453), nor do they admit of being regarded as
tentative expressions of truth, "always liable to revision"
(p. 454). To say that the objects of theology " must be sought
by other paths than those of speculation which result in the for-
mation of dogmas " (p. 452), disqualifies a man from categorically
affirming the dogmas.

Thus I feel no fear — I should rather say no hope — that I
am misinterpreting Canon Fremantle. His position towards
Revelation is in blank contradiction to the whole certitude of
the Creed, and his attitude towards the Bible, I must add, is, on
the most charitable interpretation, quite inconsistent with the
position of one who accepted his Ministry on the condition of
professing his " unfeigned belief in all the Canonical scriptures
of the Old and New Testament." The theologians of the
future will be "careful," he tells us, "not to contravene the
laws of nature." It is no doubt well that they should be so.
One is inclined to hope they will be equally careful not to con-
travene another set of laws.

3 I must point out that the Church used the word iroL-qrrj^
(Factor, Creator) in definite insistence on the idea of absolute
creation, creation " out of nothing," and in opposition to the
idea of a pre-existing matter. See Athanasius, De Inc. 2, 3 ;
Westcott, " Historic Faith," p. 38 ; Pearson " On the Creed/'
art. 1, pp. 88-96.

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